Stubborn Facts and Hard Heads; E. Opitz

Liberalism with a small "I" is the philosophy of the eighteenth century 'Vhigs which inspired our Founding Fathers and the men who wrote The Federalist. Adam Smith outlined a system of eco nomics to go with Whiggery, pro ducing a science which has been The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Educa tion, a seminar lecturer, and author of the book, Religion and Capitalism: AIIies Not En emies. amplified in our day by such men as Ludwig Mises and F. A. Hayek. Present-day spokesmen for this tradi tion generally call themselves Conservatives or Right Wingers, for the word Liberalism has been captured by the opposition. Certain of our contemporaries have turned·· this old liberal phi losophy inside out, but they have kept the label. Contemporary Lib eralism is an ideology which is the very reverse of classical liberalism. Today's Liberal has his ideologi cal heroes: chiefly Marx, Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes. Today's Liberal is a man of the Left; he seeks political power in order to impose some sort of a "Deal" on the nation. He demands that gov ernment manage the economy; he finds religion useful only insofar as the churches focus on social ac tion ; he wants to control the schools in order to condition stu dents to play their role in society.

275 276 THE FREEMAN May The contemporary Liberal has been described as a man with both feet planted firmly in mid-air. A Man of the Right I hope I have said enough to broadly identify these two schools of thought, Conservatism and Lib eralism. And to let you know where I stand, I am a man of the Right, a Conservative. I'm a Conservative, first of all, because men of this persuasion approach life with a healthy re spect for its variety, its complex ity, and its mysteries. Life is full of stubborn facts; reality is very much what it is and our wishes will not make it otherwise. It would be convenient on occasion if the multiplication table did not insist relentlessly that three times two is six; but the answer is al ways six. The facts are equally stubborn in other departments of life - not only in the natural and biological sciences, but in the re ligious, ethical, economic, and po litical sectors as well. We are surrounded by inexorable regu larities, laws which we cannot re write because we did not write them in the first place. We must accommodate ourselves to these laws,in order to succeed. But there are those among us with hard heads, and this thought does not penetrate.

Somebody said that if you ask a psychotic "How much is three times two?" he'll give you a defi nite answer. He knows three times two is seven. Ask a neurotic the same question, and this nervous chap is uncertain; the answer might be five or six or seven, but he's not sure. The Liberal knows the answer; he knows that three times two is six, but he resents it! Getting the Message Each of us, as he makes his way through life, might be compared to a blind man at the seashore using Braille to read an important message in the sand, written in code. The mall feels a sense of urgency because the tide is rising and he knows that the waves will soon obliterate the message. But the blind man restrains his anxi ety, knowing that he must not in his haste thrust his fingers roughly· against the letters in the sand lest his heavy handedness disturb and erase them. He must make every move with great deli cacy, touching the sand just firmly enough to trace the contours of each letter but not so heavily as to disturb the sand which forms them.

Tactile contact with irregulari ties in the sand puts the blind man in possession of a cluster of words. He decodes the words and gets the message; and thinking about the message, he gets its meaning.

1973 STUBBORN FACTS AND HARD HEADS 277 Ufe's Meaning Life is like that; its meaning is not self-evident, nor is it forced upon us. As we grow up into life we feel an inner compulsion to decipher its mysteries, discover some of its regularities, align our lives with what we believe to be real. Our means for doing this are meager, compared to the immense complexity of the task. We possess a spark of intelligence, our in stincts are feeble, and we have spasmodic help from experience, tradition, and the conventional wisdom of our society. But with a little luck, we can decode the message and find its meaning. What are some of the things it tells us? It tells us that we live on a rest less planet, a globe where change goes on constantly. The continents float on a molten lake, and they slowly drift away from each other. The earth's crust fidgets with a deep anxiety and occasionally erupts to change the contours of the land. Erosion occurs and we lose huge chunks of the shoreline to the sea. Iron rusts, the dollar is devalued, and each one of us is a day older than he was yesterday.

Although we ourselves change without ceasing and live our lives amidst constant change, we never theless know that some things do not change. Some things are now what they always were and always will be.· I've referred to one· such, the multiplication table. The table of atomic numbers is another in stance of fixed relationships, im mune to change. In short, there is a realm where things· are perman ent, a realm of Being in contrast to the· realm of Becoming. Some things remain; they are beyond the reach of time, and so they do not grow old, nor do they decay or rust. Theism There is God - the same yester day, today, and forever. You've heard rumors that .God is dead. Certain conceptions of the deity are dead, and good riddance. The idea of God as a heavenly Santa CIaus or God as a Cosmic Bellhop --- these ideas are laid to rest and I hope they remain so. But the idea of an overarching meaning and purpose in the universe is not dead. This is a stubborn fact, and we find meaning and purpose in our own lives only as we come to terms with it.

Belief in God, or Theism, is not an easy philosophy, but the alter native to it - carried to its logical end - is impossible. Theism is the belief that a mental-spiritual di mension is at the very heart of things. It is the belief that Mind is ultimate, and not Matter. If we do not accept this position we are driven to affirm that Matter is ulti278 THE FREEMAN May mate, with Mind being a mere de rivative. But to say that Mind is a mere offshoot of matter is to down grade our own reasoning processes and to discredit any conclusions we might reach by taking thought. Antitheism makes Matter the master of Mind; it reduces the search for truth to the movement of material particles and thus re futes itself. Life Without God I believe that Theism is impor tant, not because theology is my bag, but because of what happens when belief in God goes. First off, we lose our minds! Our mental processes are reduced to the level of a secretion from a gland.

Secondly, we lose a proper goal for life. When a society loses con tact with the transcendent there will ensue a passionate pursuit of wealth and power. Every gain by the power-hungry nullifies freedom at that point; and the frantic pur suit of material gain will destroy the market economy. Thirdly, the materialistic philos ophy of the anti-theist throws out free will; it regards every human action as determined by physical causes, overlooking human creativ ity. And if man is not a freely choosing person, it's pretty silly to try to defend the free choice eco nomic system, and even sillier to work for the free society where men enjoy maximum liberty to choose and pursue their own life goals. Fourth, and finally, there is no place for moral values in a uni verse where Matter is ultimate where, in philosophical language, the distinction between right and wrong has no ontological status, no reality. In Communist coun tries, right is whatever the Party commands, and wrong is whatever the Party forbids. In such a soci ety there is no appeal from arbi trary commands to a standard of justice above the law; goodness is equated to Party loyalty. On this point, at least, the comrades are logical; if God is dead, men are creatures of the State; its fiats are their la:w.

My second stubborn fact is that there is a moral order. The uni verse consists of more than brute facts; it contains ethical values. If there is a genuine moral law op erating in 1973, it is the same moral law which operated in 1973 B.C. Men's interpretations of the moral law might vary, due to ig norance or wishful thinking. But the law which is subject to mis taken interpretations does not it self vary; it is what it is, and our thinking does not make it so or not so. A primitive people might believe that the stars in a night sky are the souls of departed tribesmen, 1973 STUBBORN FACTS AND HARD HEADS 279 and that the sun is a huge torch borne across the sky by the tribal deity. But these erroneous concep tions no more invalidate our as tronomy than do the weird notions of right and wrong entertained by these same tribesmen - or by con temporary intellectuals - invali date the ethical code built up around the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. There is a moral order with ideal norms and standards for flourishing human life, and in the long run no society can flout the moral order without courting destruction; every per son must eventually come to terms with it if he would fulfill the po tentials his life holds.

The third stubborn fact is hu man nature itself. A piece of silly putty can be molded into any shape you choose; throw it down and it will slowly subside into a formless mass. The human being, by con trast, is a dynamic transformer of his environment; he does not pass ively lapse into whatever the situ ation in which he finds himself. We are adaptable and durable crea tures, but we adjust to realities only so that we might more effec tively cope with the difficulties at tendent upon survival and growth. There are permanent elements in human nature because of our relationship to God and the moral order. There is in us a sacred es sence, a private domain in each person to which he alone has ac cess and over which he alone pos sesses rights. "We are endowed by our Creator," the Declaration reads, "with certain unalienable rights," and it is a function of gov ernment to help secure those rights. We are not mere end prod ucts of natural and social forces; we are created beings. God made us free, and any man or institution.

which impairs liberty frustrates some purpose of the Creator. Laws of Economics God, the moral order, human na ture; these are stubborn facts. And so are the laws of economics. When certain consequences follow invariably from certain antece dents we are entitled to speak of this regularity as a law. There are indeed economic laws, for we can say: Choose these policies and you will be visited by such and such consequences; the consequences are built into the policies and the only way you can avoid them is to reject those policies. For example: • Whenever a government expands the money supply - which is the definition of inflation - the price level rises and people find that they cannot afford things. It Impose rent controls and the growth rate of new housing de clines, while present housing de teriorates. • Pay a man for not working - Un280 THE FREEMAN May employment Compensation - and he will produce less, or stop work ing altogether.

• Legislate monopoly unionism and you institutionalize unemployment. • Impose minimum wage laws and you do someone out of a job. • Launch a government war on pov erty and you increase the number of poor people. • Allow the trading nations of the world to fix the price of each oth er's currency and you will suffer periodic deval uations of the dollar - or the mark, or the yen, or the pound. I might lengthen this list - and I know that each of these blunt propositions needs to be backed by a book - but you get the idea. The last of the stubborn facts I want to mention concerns govern ment. I remarked earlier that peo ple of my persuasion who today ac cept the Conservative label would have been called Whigs or classical liberals a couple of centuries ago. Classical liberalism marked a radi cal departure from all other polit ical theories and practices. It de clared that the end of government is justice between man and man, and maximum liberty for each per son in society.

Questions of Power From ancient times to the pres ent, every political theorist - ex cept the classical liberals - tried to frame answers for three questions. The first question was : Who shall wield power? Whether the struc ture took the form of a monarchy backed by divine right or a democ racy based on the so-called will of the majority, it was esserttial that power be wielded by the small group thought most fit to exercise rule. But it was not power simply for power's sake, but political pow er for the sake of economic ad vantage. So the second question is: For whose benefit shall this power be wielded? The· court at Versaille is a good example of what I mean. The French nobles favored by roy alty lived rather well although they'd rather be ca.ught dead than working. In virtue of their priv ileged position in the political structure, they got something for nothing. I daresay that each of you can think of parallel instances op erating today, even in our own country.

Now, when someone in a society gets something for nothing through political channels, there are others in that society who are forced to accept nothing for some thing! So the third question is: At whose expense shall this power be wielded? Let me repeat these three ques tions, for they provide an apt key to most political puzzles: Who shall wield power? For whose benefit? At whose expense? One might put 1973 STUBBORN FACTS AND HARD HEADS 281 this in a formula: Votes and taxes for all; subsidies and privileges for us, our friends, and whoever else happens at the moment to pack a lot of political clout. Equality Before the Law The American system was to be based upon a different idea. It took seriously the ideas of God, the moral order, and the rights of per sons. It discarded the notion of using government to arbitrarily disadvantage a selected segment of society, and instead embraced the idea of equality before the law.

Government, in this scheme, func tioned somewhat like an umpire on the baseball field. The umpire does not write the rules for base ball; they have emerged and been inscribed in rule books over the years and they lay down the norms as to how the game shall be play-ed. If any person is on the field it is to be presumed that he has freely chosen to be there because he wants to play baseball; otherwise he'd be on the tennis court, the golf links, or in the poolroom. He wants to play ball, and in his thoughtful moments he knows that the game cannot go on unless there is an impartial arbiter on the field to interpret and enforce last resort decisions - such as ball or strike, or safe at first. Baseball is inconceivable with out a rule book, and that goes for every other game as well. It would not be a baseball game if every man on the diamond merely did his own thing; it would be chaos. The rules of the game are not designed to hamper the player, although ev eryone who has ever played ball has had moments when he'd like the rules to bend a little in his fa vor; the rules are what make base ball possible. Or chess. Or tennis.

Or any other area of life you'd care to mention. In the absence of rules there is sheer disorder, on the playing field as in life. But surely not in the realm of art, someone might say. There may be economic laws, and Edmond Hoyle did compile his bqok of games; but Shakespeare did not write his poems "according to Hoyle." Great artists often com pose or paint in a frenzy of inspi ration, our objector might say; the creator knows that the rules are there to be broken; the artist is averse to order. At first thought this rebuttal does seem to carry some weight, for some modern composers do disregard the rules; they compose without melody, without rhythm, without harmony -- without talent. But there is mag nificent order in a Beethoven sym phony; the great composer did not write his symphonies "by the book," but most emphatically he did not discard the rules. There is indeed an affinity between the art282 THE FREEMAN May ist and disorder, but only in the sense that disorder or chaos chal lenges the artist to bring order and harmony out of it.

The order present in all real art might not be immediately obvious to the untrained eye or ear, and in great art it is artfully concealed. Go to the Parthenon and contem plate the frieze sculpted by Phid ias. Motion and fluidity strike the eye, but as Gerald Heard writes: "Scrape down the figures to their main structural lines and there, clear and hard as the rib and fret work of an Arabian vault, stands out the geometrical design, hold ing all this apparent streaming fluidity in an iron order." Who would dare argue that Shakespeare's genius was blunted by having to conform to the fixed pattern of the sonnet? This ready made poetic form actually en hanced the poet's freedom; it al lowed him to spend all his genius on content. Apart from the various forms a written language might take poetry, novels, essays, dramas, and so on - there is the language it self. Sometimes the niceties of grammar seem to lie in wait just to ensnare the ideas that rush pell mell out of our minds, or we bog down in a syntactical quagmire.

But if it weren't for the language which we absorb as our mother tongue we would have no way to express our ideas, and our ideas would be of the foggiest sort. Not even the most brilliant mind con ceivable could invent a new lan guage from scratch; and even if the miracle occurred he could not use it to communicate. The rules of language, which sometimes are an noying, are at the same time a vehicle for our freedom; just as, for a swimmer, the water whose friction impedes his progress pro vides the buoyancy without which swimming would be impossible. Chaos and Disorder I have belabored this point only beca use we Iive at a time of pas sionate rebellion against the very concept of order, a time when dis order is the new thing, the "in" thing in every department of hu man affairs. Such key words as Law, Order, Norms, Standards, and the like, are dirty words today. Abandonment of the rules is con fused with freedom; the slave to impulse and whim thinks he is a free man. The result is chaos in the souls of men and anarchy in society.

Every society must find ways of dealing with people whose erratic conduct deviates significantly from the norms of human behavior ac ceptable in that society. Those who cannot figure out what these norms are, or who know but refuse to conform to them, are the crimi1073 STUBBORN FACTS AND HARD HEADS 283 nals and the psycopaths. In a hu mane society such people are treat ed with understanding, compas sion and Christian charity; but no society can long survive a take over by the antisocial. By defini tion, this is the case. It must, therefore, be able to distinguish social from antisocial conduct, and this our society is having trouble doing. So far has the erosion of norms gone in our society that the, idea of abnormality has just about disap peared. Standards of right and wrong have crumpled, the rule book has been pitched out the win dow, and each one of us is advised merely to do his own thing. Any thing goes ; every variety of con duct and any kind of life style is to be tolerated because, it is al leged, no one can say what is nor mal and what is not. What is right for one man may not be right for another, we hear it said, so let every person decide for himself what is right for him. Anything goes; everything must be tol erated.

No Standards Remain At this point we turn the corner and the relativist is hoist with his own petard. The rela tivist can pro pound his theory and practice his eccentricities only so long as most other people refuse to accept rela tivism and continue to live straight. But as soon as the bal ance begins to tip toward relativ ism, the result is nihilism. If ev erything must be tolerated, then intolerance is sanctioned. If any thing goes, and there's no way to prove that anything is better or worse than anything else, then in tolerance is no worse and no better than tolerance! Tolerant is what a person should be if he's so in clined; and intolerant is what a per son should be if his conscience im pels him· in that direction. Having abandoned norms and standards, we have no way of deciding that one thing is better than another, or that this is right and that wrong. "If it feels good," reads the bumper sticker, "do it."

Each of us has his inner world, but we also live in the world out side. Rules and standards, right and wrong, are in the area that exists outside of and above indi vidual subjectivity; feelings, on the other hand, are strictly private, inhabiting the individual's inner domain. Norms are objective; they are "out there," and they are what they are regardless of what we might think they are. A toothache is subjective, it belongs to you alone; it is wholly private, not public at all. There's no limit to the number of persons who can come to a knowledge of the norms which apply to human behavior, but only you experience your pain.

284 THE FREEMAN May The only response another person can make to your pain is to sym pathize. Go back now to the bumper sticker: "If, it feels good, do it." The only referent here is to the domain of individual subjectivity. If an individual says that some thing feels good he has made an ultimate judgment, for no one is in a position to get inside another and tell him otherwise. There's nothing to discuss; preferences and likes are final. It might occur to you to tell another that the wrong things make him feel good, that his affectional nature is warped and perverted; otherwise, he wouldn't take pleasure in beat ing up old ladies. But this fellow is a bit of a philosopher too, so he re minds you that he has abandoned norms, and without this plumbline there's no reason why he should not prefer his feelings to yours which, in fact, he does. It's another story if we amend the advice to read: "If it's right, do it." Now here there is some thing to discuss, for the idea of right is "out there." We can talk things over and possibly come to an agreement that the proposed line of action is indeed right, or not; and further, if it is right, whether doing it now is proper, or expedient, or whatever.

I do not mean to suggest that every person who innocently repeats the catchphrase, "Do your own thing," is a nihilist, with full awareness of the implications of this position. He might say, Do your own thing, so long as it doesn't hurt anyone; or Do your own thing and allow everyone else the same latitude. But such a per son has appealed to a' norm, the ancient norm, "Injure no man." This norm implies others, and pretty soon you've restored the rule book. A warning is in order: Those who begin by adopting the vocabulary of nihilism may end by becoming its victims. The Cult of Abnormality Having opened the can of worms this far, permit me to pry back the lid a little further and offer a clinical example: gay liberation. Homosexuality is a sad fact of life, and because homosexuality is not a life-affirming but rather a life denying attitude, it comes to the fore especially during periods of a nation's decadence. When all stand ards are in doubt, the norms of maleness and the norms of female ness become unclear, and so we hear it said that homosexuality is just as normal as heterosexuality.

They pose the question: Who is to say what is normal? The question is intended to be merely rhetorical, supplying its own answer, that no one is entitled to say what is nor mal and what is abnormal. But if 1973 STUBBORN FACTS AND.HARD HEADS 285 the rule book has been discarded and there. is a general rej ection of the idea that there are standards which men and women. should try to live up to, then ruthless dealing with our fellows is no more to be condemned than kindliness and generosity is to be applauded. It is a fact of the human situa tion as such, that if a male does cut a sorry figure as a man he will cut an even sorrier figure in the feminine role; likewise the female. Such persons cut themselves off from the understanding and help they need from the rest of us when they employ the false and des perate argument that no one can say what is normal. The argument will eventually backfire in the form of hostility and intolerance on the part of those who have been in formed that this reaction is just as normal as the opposite atti tude, and twice as much fun.

The Realm of Necessity I have talked at length about stubborn facts, unchanging regu larities, rules, order - and the ne cessity thereby imposed upon us to conform our conduct to the way things are. I have emphasized the domain of necessity only because its imperatives are widely ignored or denied today. But if this were the whole story, or even the most important part of it, we'd come away with the notion of a mechanically arranged universe in which man cheerlessly and robot-like serves out his sentence under a rigid prison routine of eat, sleep, and work. This is not at all what I have in mind, for such a grim caricature of life would be an af front to our Creator and omit the most important fact of our inner nature, its radical freedom! There is a realm of necessity, but there is also a realm of freedom; suc cessful living demands that we give each its due. Imagine yourself at the poker table. You are dealt a particular hand. The cards you hold may give you an edge or they may impose a handicap; in either case it is the way you exercise your freedom to play your hand that really counts; it's a combination of luck and skill, with skill being the critical factor.

Now take a look at baseball. I have stressed the importance of the rule book in baseball; but men sitting down to chew over the rules is not baseball. We couldn't play baseball without the rule book, but the game itself is' something else again. It is the incredible hatting, pitching, fielding, and strategic skills of the players and coach; it is the excitement of Yankee Stadi um, the constant. murmur of the crowd, the tension that mounts in tight situations; it is winning, and the horseplay in the locker room. This is the game of baseball, and 286 THE FREEMAN May the only function of the rule book is to make all this possible. If Nature Were Unpredidable, We Could Not Survive It is much the same in life; it is only from the neutral base of order and dependability in nature and society that we can exercise our freedom creatively. If nature were completely unpredictable we could not survive, and if we could not count on our fellow men in a vari ety of situations society would col lapse. There are stubborn facts we cannot change, which we must simply accept, to which we must adjust ourselves; but there is also the infinitely expansible domain of our freedom where our capacity to create tips the balance in the di rection we will it to go. The things at stake here have been well put in the old prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom· to know the difference."

When we do understand the diff erence' our freedom begets a new awareness of the majesty of the order where necessity prevails; we are awed by Jts mysteries and charmed by its beauties. Beyond mere survival we get a bonus ev ery time we interact with our world. Reflect for a moment on our five senses; sight, taste, hearing, smell, and touch. The animal uses his eyes to survive, to spot his prey and to see his foes before they see him. Our eyes also serve a utilitarian pur pose, but in addition we can look with them, and when we look we find sheer delight in the colors, the patterns, and the visible arrange ments of our planetary home. Be yond this, there is reading, there are the pleasures of art and archi tecture. We get a second bonus with the sense of taste. It is conceivable that we might be fed intravenously with all the food elements we need for survival but with no accom panying gustatory pleasure; I don't suppose an earthworm has a palate and the same is true of most other forms of life. How come we human beings are so lucky?

Then there is the gift of hearing There is survival value in being able to pick up sound waves and be thus warned of danger, but that's only a minor part of the auditory world. There's the murmur of the wind in the. pines, the song of a bird, the babble of a brook, the roar of the surf, the sizzle of a steak, the sound of music. Music is a realm unto itself, and without it, the philosopher said with pardon able exaggeration, life would be a mistake. Nor should we overlook the sense of smell which takes us· into the subtle world of fragrances. In1973 STUBBORN FACTS AND HARD HEADS 287 cense has performed its humble service for the sacred since the dawn of time, and the art of the perfumer antedates history. The blossom and the fruit strike the olfactory sense and an ancient ra cial memory stirs. And it is not only for the blind that the world of touch - the feel of textures, contours, warmth, re silience - exists.

Life pours out its richness in a veritable torrent, but we stand alongside this flood trying to scoop up the precious stuff with a thim ble! Our container is too small; that's why we take in only a frac tion of what's available to us. The bottleneck is within us, in our own thick heads! We've got to enlarge our capacity; exchange the thim ble for a tea cup; the tea cup for a bucket; the bucket for a barrel. We'~e got to work on ourselves, for there's little any person can do for another until he has done Communication his utmost with his own being. As Gerald Heard put it, we've got to grow as big inside as the whale has grown outside. Some few have made it, and what they have done we can emulate. Harry Emerson Fosdick tells about baby sitting his five-year-old niece. The child got restless so Fos dick went to an old copy of Life magazine and tore out a p~ge on which was a map of the world. He cut this into a number of little pieces and then told his niece, "Now put this map together." He set the child at a table and went back to work in his study.

In ten minutes the child popped into his study and announc~d that she had finished. This seemed in credible so Fosdick asked her how she had done it. "There was a man's picture on the other side of the map," said the child, "and when I put the man together the world came out right." ~ IDEAS ON LIBERTY How do you persuade a man to change his mind? You don't threaten him, you don't lecture him, you don't accuse him of evil crimes. You show your own security in other ideas and you keep on exhibiting evidence of the validity of those ideas. You don't especially try to prove anything; that only makes people sus picious; you get busy creating the good society filled with good men of the sort you say flouris~ naturally under the rules of your society .... You concentrate on production of the persuasive facts. From MANAS, September 26, 1962 Too FREQUENTLY too many of us ig nore the clear, concise lesson to be learned by incidents and situations which we .. view only as passing commonplace, and principally a source of boredom or delay, or both.